Updating all outdated Perl modules

A. Sinan Unur

May 20, 2012

The following is probably not the kind of procedure one would follow in a well organized environment.

I, on the other hand, have a handful of computers, each of which has a bunch of perls installed. Most of those might be activated (via perlbrew once in a while. That means, I sometimes find that I need to make sure everything is up-to-date before checking a bunch of things.

Then, we have the Mac, with the various perls installed via MacPorts, and, also, via perlbrew. Then, there are two netbooks with ArchLinux on them, the dual boot partition on my main laptop.

I think you get the picture. Nothing is mission critical. Each Perl distribution has a bunch of modules I installed using cpanm at some point.

I'd rather try to upgrade all the modules/distributions I have for one specific perl at once: If anything is messed up, I am not averse to nuking that perl and everything that came with it, and starting from scratch. It hasn't happened yet, but if it does, I doubt I'll spend more time dealing with that than I would have fiddling with all the individual environments in turn.

Most of the time, I can just type a couple of commands and leave:

$ cpanm --self-upgrade
$ cpan-outdated |cpanm

If you want to inspect the CHANGES for everything that is outdated, you can use cpan-outdated |cpan-listchanges (hat tip Daniel Lavelle who seems to be much more disciplined about the whole thing ;-)

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